After two years, I think I have my Replicator (apparently the first one shipped) finally working reliably to produce >1 hour prints. Thank you @iandanforth for asking if I had a description of the mods I did and prompting me to write this.

The Replicator has been a very frustrating product. After a few out-of-the-box failures, it worked great for the first week and then rapidly deteriorated. And a few months later, the Replicator 2 was announced and support for my product rapidly evaporated. Many of the things I print are small and take <15 minutes to print, so I’ve been dealing with a <30% success rate of printing, or using other 3d printers. But I think I’ve been slowly iterating towards a reliable Replicator.

Assuming the basic mechatronics of the printer work, the most critical fix is the new extruder design. If you’ve ever experienced your Replicator stopping extruding or only partially extruding, it’s because the original mechanism to push the filament against the extruder motor sucked. This change was so important that Makerbot themselves retrofitted all Replicator 2s with it.

The next most critical mod is replacing those stupid plastic cantilever arms with something sturdier. Even at room temp, those arms exhibited considerable flex. Heat up the bed and the build plate would droop a few layers, causing so. many. failed prints. With the Bottleworks Aluminum arms, the bed is now rock solid.

From that and the (now discontinued) Makerbot Operators list, I’m just waiting for the day when the entire Replicator motherboard fries itself (another story, there are many) due to bad voltage regulator design. When that happens, not sure what I’ll do.

A few days ago ThingM friend Rusty, operator of the wonderful SomaFM, wondered if there would ever be a “blink(16)”: a blink(1) with a 4×4 grid of LEDs. Well it turns out that due to a secret feature of all blink(1) mk2s, it’s actually pretty easy to make, if you have some WS2812-style LED strip laying around.

Making a blink(1) mk2 use 16 extra LEDs is pretty easy because it has a hidden 3-pin port for wiring up WS2812/NeoPixel-type LED strips. In this photo, you can see the three holes: one each for Gnd, +5V, and data.

Below is a video showing it in action. The two ‘blink1-tool’ commands used in the video are:

About a year ago, while I was developing the blink(1) mk2, I created both a PIC16F1455 development board and a little assemblage that was tiny enough to toss in my laptop bag but powerful enough to let me develop on the PIC. I could now develop firmware in a coffeeshop!

The Sabrent USB hub is because it acts a partial goof-protector if I short USB power & ground and the per-port power switches make it easy to power-cycle the device I’m developing without unplugging-replugging. The solderless breadboard is just big enough to support the addition of a few extra components. And my dev board has female headers with male pins that stick into the breadboard, holding it securely place and making wiring to the dev board a snap.

If only MPLAB X & PICKit3 wasn’t so pokey for programming (it can take 15 seconds from the time you click “Upload” to having your code running on the device)

My talk “Intro to the Arduino Entrepreneurial System” touched on all these topics. The entire event was a blast, including a wonderful talk about commercial making with open source by Quinn of QtechKnow.

Whew, MakerFaire Bay Area 2013 is over and it was astoundingly fun. Not only did we get to interact with so many people doing awesome things with ThingM products (like these BlinkM MinM earrings) but we got to show off a bunch of projects made with blink(1) and BlinkM-family stuff to thousands of new people. We heard tallies of 120,000 people showed up over the weekend, and we love seeing the concepts the Maker community inspires diffusing out into the larger world, as this LA Times article speaks to.

This year not only were we fortunate enough to have a ThingM table in the Maker Shed (Thank you Leah, Alex, Will, Carlyn, & Mike for helping staff it), but we also gave talks. Mike spoke about the future of manufacturing in a work filled with Maker-inspired tools and techniques, while I gave a talk on the process we went through to take blink(1) from an idea to Kickstarter to production.

blink(1) mk2 is an updated version of the blink(1) super status light. The original blink(1) made it easy to connect any data source in the cloud or on your computer to a full-color RGB LED so you can know what’s happening without checking any windows, going to any websites or typing any commands. blink(1) mk2 maintains backward-compatibility while adding better functionality and great new features.

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blink(1) USB RGB LED!

blink(1)is a super status light. It fits into any USB port on almost every type of computer: Mac, Linux, Windows, Raspberry Pi, Beaglebone, WRT router, etc. No drivers needed and APIs in about every language you could want. And it's all open source.